Disaster Ray
by cathrl
Summary: Zoltar's most dangerous weapon yet is a giant raygun which can reverse transmutation. If you're thinking "but wasn't there an episode rather like this called 'The Awesome Ray Force?" you'd be right. This story was inspired by the Writers Anonymous Alternative Format Challenge (Rashomon).
1. Chapter 1

Many, many years ago, way back in the last century, my first foray into fanfic writing involved novelising and retconning episodes which I'd seen only once, often with the sound turned right down since I wasn't supposed to be watching anything which was American, cartoon or science fiction, and BotP was all three. One of those episodes was "The Awesome Ray Force", a wonderful title which I changed mostly since it wouldn't fit on one line of my A4 handwritten final version using my favourite stencil. "Disaster Ray" fitted just fine.

Fast forward something over thirty years and I'm having a discussion in a fanfic forum about "Rashomon storytelling", which involves a story whose narrator(s) have forgotten or misinterpreted things, so the story they tell isn't quite what happened. And I realised that my novelisations were rather like this, except that I was the one who'd got things wrong rather than the characters. Plus, I was a young teen when I wrote these things. No internet for research, and the Mary Sue self-insert from hell. I could do better now. So I decided I'd rewrite my thirty year old novelisation - but without referring back to the episode.

Something a bit different. If you're looking for canon accuracy, you're probably in the wrong place :)

* * *

 **Disaster Ray**

The sun was shining, the sky was blue, and Mark's second-in-command was roaring round the racetrack. Far below their seats high in the stand, the navy ISO Racing car was almost touching the rear end of the race leader. Mark suspected that was exactly where Jason wanted to be.

"This is good," he said in a brief lull in the engine noise.

"Mmmm." Keyop probably meant the ice cream, but both Tiny and Princess nodded.

"We should do this more often," Princess said.

"It's not like we haven't tried. Remind me when the last time was we had a free weekend?" They tried their hardest to make sure Jason got to race, but that frequently meant moving all Jason-less four-man training to Saturday afternoons.

Tiny shrugged. "Point taken. How long's he going to wait? Only twenty laps to go."

"Nineteen laps, then." Mark had been party to Jason's tactical discussion the previous evening - at least, he'd sat at the ready room table and drunk coffee, nodding in what he hoped were the right places. Jason had wanted to think out loud. It wasn't like he thought Mark was a tactical racing genius.

Sit on the leader's shoulder, let him clear the path through the backmarkers and worry about the race line and do all the thinking. Go for it with a lap or two to go. That had been the plan. Apparently Jason could stick to plans when racing was involved.

"How many -" Mark stopped, swallowed the curse, fishing in his pocket for the entirely non-functional cellphone he carried for show. "Hi, Chief. What can I do for you?"

"I need you all back here now," said Anderson's voice through his bracelet.

"What's the problem?"

"We'll discuss it when you get back."

"But Jason's..." He didn't bother completing the sentence. Anderson had already hung up.

"We need to go," he said shortly, not bothering to hide his disappointment.

"But -" Keyop caught his eye and got to his feet, heading for the nearest exit without another word. Their seats were on the end of the row for exactly this eventuality.

 _If only it was that simple with Jason_. The message had come to him only, not the rest of the team sitting alongside, and that 'all' had been very pointed. Clearly Anderson considered it Mark's job to assemble them. Did he know that Jason was racing at this very moment? Probably. Mark glanced round the track hopefully. Maybe Jason was even now faking some sort of mechanical failure. But no, ISO Racing's Car 2 was still glued to the back of the leader, showing no signs of slowing down.

Reluctantly, he raised the bracelet/phone combination to his mouth again. "Jason?"

"A bit busy here."

"We're needed."

A sigh. "Why?"

 _You had to ask, didn't you?_ "Anderson didn't say."

A pause, as below him on the track the two leading cars neatly avoided a couple of backmarkers. A rather longer pause than the manoeuvre demanded.

"Then I'll see you in fourteen laps."

Mark took a deep breath. _Don't yell at him_ , he told himself. _And don't say anything you shouldn't. You could still be overheard_. He'd waited to call Jason until he was at the top of the stairwell, yards rather than feet from the nearest spectators in the packed stands, but this was still far from private.

"I need you to-"

"Mark, I'm trying to win a race here. Fourteen laps - shi-"

A gasp from the crowd. A cloud of smoke on the track. Mark's blood ran cold - had he distracted Jason at a crucial moment and caused a crash? But the leading few cars cleared the smoke at full speed and it was a backmarker which trailed onto the infield, its back right tyre reduced to shreds of spinning rubber.

He gave things ten seconds to settle down, leaning against the rail and trying to give the impression that he'd left his seat to stretch his legs for a moment.

"Jason?"

No response.

"Jason!"

Not even race noise. The channel was dead, cut off at the other end. _Dammit_. But he couldn't make Jason comply. He could only do his own job.

"Let's go," he said to the three concerned faces waiting below him at the first bend in the stairwell. "He'll have to catch us up."

"The speed he drives, he'll probably be there before us," said Tiny.

Mark wasn't sure if it was a joke, a genuine belief, or a coded message that Tiny planned to drive them back slowly enough to make sure it happened that way. He decided he didn't want to know.

* * *

Thirteen laps - no, twelve - to go. Nine until he was supposed to start pushing. Wind the lead driver up for a couple of laps, then pick his moment and go for it. There was no point planning it in any more detail than that - the clear sections of track would be where they were, on an oval like this where track layout wasn't an issue. All things being equal, he'd go for it on the back straight with two laps to go.

What did Anderson want? And why not send a scramble if it was urgent? So it wasn't urgent. It was probably just a test.

Well, the rest of the team should be long gone by now, and he'd be back fifteen minutes after them, cover story intact. That must be the intention, surely?

Now all he needed to do was win the race. Eleven laps to go and he was tired of counting. Jason scanned the track ahead for opportunities and saw one. A couple of laps at their current closing speed and there should be a gap in the traffic, right after they'd spent half a lap weaving through five or six backmarkers. The leader could do all the work of overtaking in a crowd, and just as he thought he was done and could take a breather, Jason would go for it. A few laps earlier than planned, but he had a reason not to hang around now.

"Two laps, back straight," he said into the radio. "Anything I should know?"

"Going round the outside? Give him plenty of room. He'll drift out. Caused a few accidents, that one." Carl didn't sound impressed. Jason wasn't, either. Driving a racecar was dangerous enough without your fellow competitors making it worse.

He shouldn't even be here. He should be half way back to ISO by now, on his way to being briefed by Anderson. Or to be chewed out for making a bad call and risking his civilian cover. Which was it? Every time he thought it through he came to a different conclusion. Couldn't they just stick to fighting bad guys?

"Jason, steady," said Carl's voice in his ear. "Sit back, slipstream him, save your tyres."

 _Dammit, he shouldn't need to tell me that_. Jason blinked hard, refocusing. Carl was right. He was off the racing line and too close. Especially following a driver with a rep for drifting. Regardless of whether he'd made the right call, losing the race now would be bad and crashing even worse. He was always being told he needed to be better at compartmentalising. He was going to do it, right now. Nine laps of perfect driving.

.

He was well clear of his closest rival when he took the chequered flag, after what felt like the slowest nine laps of his life, whatever the speedometer said. Samuels the G-Force shrink was right. His compartmentalisation sucked.

He waved to the crowd as cheerfully as he could manage - they'd never see that he wasn't smiling behind the helmet - and pulled into the pits with his stomach churning in an uncomfortable mixture of joy, guilt and uncertainty as to how to extract himself quickly from the celebrations.

Nobody so much as turned round. All eyes were fixed on the TV screen on the back wall. Wobbly cellphone footage of a huge plume of dust and smoke rising above a flattish plain, hills in the background. Across the bottom of the screen, a scrolling banner with the important details. Jason stopped caring after 'Spectran attack.'

He'd made a horrible mistake.

He wasn't sure when he'd got out of the car, but when heads turned he realised he was on his feet and they were reacting to the sound of the car door shutting. He didn't remember doing that, either. Or taking the helmet off.

"Sorry, son," Ed said. "Nice race. I guess you'll be needing to leave before the presentation."

He just nodded, not trusting his voice. He didn't know how much Ed had been told, how much he'd guessed - but he certainly knew that Jason was a security operative. An attack serious enough to get this sort of TV attention? All security operatives would be heading back to ISO as soon as they heard. Or should have been.

"Main roads out of town have been shut. You've got access to the back road, right?" Ed didn't wait for his confirmation. "Go. I'll make your excuses. It'll be gridlock once the crowd starts leaving."

 _Which will be right about now, since that was the last race I just won._ Jason forced a grin. "Thanks, Ed. See you when this is over."

He grabbed his bag from the changing room and headed out at a run, not taking the time to change out of his race suit. Every minute counted - he'd be turning out of the parking lot against the main flow of traffic, but he still had a couple of miles to go on local roads which would rapidly fill up with people trying to find a rat run home.

As he crossed the parking lot, he could hear the announcer say that the winner of the last race had had to leave for personal reasons and the track staff of course all wished him the best, but the presentation would still be starting shortly. Jason snorted to himself. Like the crowd wouldn't put together the news alerts on their smartphones and the fact that he was an ISO driver. People were already streaming down from the stands and out towards their cars. He considered the rapidly increasing traffic levels and accelerated from a run to a sprint.

The teams had their own section of assigned parking, and, thankfully, their own exit, much less busy than the public one. Jason waved his racing pass at the guard without stopping and turned right onto an empty lane rather than left into what was already a continuous line of creeping traffic. He didn't need the satnav, but he activated it anyway to see just how bad the jams were. Solid red on the main routes out of town until suddenly there was nothing at all. No prizes for guessing where the roadblocks were. A mixture of green and empty all the way to the back road, though. Time to report in.

For a moment he couldn't remember what the blinking pattern of his bracelet's security light meant, and then he swore. Comms insecure, do not use. Right about now, Mark would be reporting to Anderson, telling him that the Condor had refused to pull out of a race despite a direct order, and he couldn't even radio in and say he was on his way.

There were at least two speed camera flashes before he reached the end of the back road, one close to the track and the other in the industrial estate. More trouble. He hoped he'd get an exemption for them, and suspected he wouldn't, not if Anderson had to sign off on it. Too bad. He was at the gate now and everything should be easy from here. He pulled up in front of the barriers - a pair of ten foot high steel gates in an equally over-engineered fence, mesh-filled, razor wire-tipped, impassable to pedestrians and cyclists as well as motor vehicles. Warning signs said that beyond it was a military range with unexploded ordnance. Jason was reasonably sure that wasn't true, but it did keep curious civilians out. His standard ISO badge on the scanner opened the gates just fine - his bracelet would have, too, but there was just a chance that someone might be watching and think it was odd not to see him use a card like everyone else did.

The gates swung shut behind him, and ahead was ten miles of narrow, twisting tarmac, steeply uphill through woods initially, then out onto the cliff edge all the way up the coast to ISO. Jason transmuted as soon as he was round the first corner and out of sight, and accelerated hard. He'd wasted far too much time already.

Throwing the transmuted G-2 along narrow twisting tarmac, with its colossal power and superior grip, wasn't much like track racing, but it was at least as challenging. Jason didn't think anything would be heading in the other direction given what was happening, but he still made sure to watch the road ahead every time it appeared on an external corner of the cliff. There could well be other cars going the same way as him, and he'd be moving a whole lot faster than anything else.

Instead, he caught the glint of something metallic in the rear view mirror.

Couldn't be. He hadn't overtaken anyone and nothing could live with the transmuted G-2, even on a road where he was barely opening the throttle at all.

Another glimpse. It wasn't just keeping up, it was catching him. Fast. Multiple vehicles, he thought. Strange shapes. One of them looked to have some sort of missile on the top.

 _It could be an ISO prototype. Maybe there is a range here after all._

He didn't believe it for a moment. That thing looked hostile. He raised the bracelet to his mouth to report - this was too important to worry about possible comms insecurity - and discovered that the light sequence had gone from 'insecure' to 'unavailable'.

Jason swore out loud and considered his very limited options. He was already going as fast as he dared on this road, so he couldn't outrun them. He could transmute back and play innocent when they caught him, but they'd have to be astonishingly thick not to figure it out. Spectran goons often were astonishingly thick, but he wasn't prepared to take the risk, not when it involved facing them in civilian mode.

One chance: a layby half a mile ahead. There were several serious rock climbs on the cliffs below, and ISO was home to a large number of fit, athletic young agents. On a sunny Saturday afternoon he might just get lucky. He had absolutely no margin for error, though. He might be out of sight of his pursuers for as much as ten seconds, but it would probably be less.

Round the sharp external corner in the cliff, and he was in luck. Two cars were parked at the wide point, with a space between them that no standard driving technique could slot a car into. He wasn't sure he could pull it off, but he was out of other options. Jason lined it up and threw the G-2 into a sliding, skidding spin which left it pointing back down the road, a deserted car front and back, looking as if it had been there all day. Now all he needed was to leave it equally deserted and in civilian mode. Not the G-2 they'd been chasing, nice cold engine even if they stopped to check.

He leapt out and straight up the side of the cliff. He and Mark had climbed here a couple of times. There was a ledge - a real one, not something only a climber would use the term for - about twenty feet above the road, half way to the top. Mid-air, Jason hit the button to detransmute the G-2, and only as he landed on the ledge did he realise that he hadn't seen a flash. _Comms unavailable,_ he realised. _Shit_. Too late now.

Five vehicles came round the corner and stopped in the middle of the road. Definitely Spectran - the green-suited goons piling out of it gave that away even without the alien lines and colour scheme. How had they got through the security gate at the end of the road? Heck, how had they been going so fast?

 _Act, not react_. But he honestly had no idea what he should do. He couldn't call for help and he was about to lose the transmuted version of the G-2 to a Spectran goon squad. Refusing to pull out of a race was going to be trivial when compared to this.

He could see the smirks from here - sure, it was beautifully slotted between two civilian vehicles, but no Spectran in the universe was so thick that they'd fail to recognise the single seater closed cockpit vehicle with 'G-2' helpfully painted on the side. Or, he suspected, that they wouldn't be able to figure out who had been driving it.

The Spectrans fanned out, approaching the G-2 cautiously. Could he take them? Sure, those six. Not the ten behind them as well - and then there was the mysterious weapon mounted on the largest, central vehicle. He'd thought it was some sort of a gun initially, but now it was closer he could see that the front tapered to a point. A laser, maybe?

Movement visible behind the weapon. Raised voices, speaking Spectran too fast for him to catch. And the barrel swiveled, aiming directly at the G-2. Green fire lanced out - not a laser, though, it wasn't straight and narrow enough for a laser beam. This was more like a lightning strike, with a brilliant after-image of forked branches.

Jason blinked to clear his vision, and his Nissan Skyline lay below him. Some sort of delay on the comms, the result of the signal he thought he'd failed to send? But the goons didn't look surprised in the slightest. Satisfied, maybe. Looking in delight at the weapon.

 _That thing reverses transmutation._

 _This is bad. This is really, really bad._

He shifted forward on the ledge, trying to get a better view. Were those cooling pipes down the side? Certainly one of them appeared to have split, and where the fluid dripped onto the casing, steam rose. Blue fluid, too, and from the way it was dripping, pretty darn viscous. High boiling point. That thing was hot even after one shot. Maybe he could -

"There he is!"

He didn't wait for the ray to target him. Just seeing it start to move was enough, with the memory of that vicious green lightning. Jason leapt for the top of the cliff, knowing there was nowhere on this bare rockface to hide and that his only hope was to get over the edge.

Ten feet. Twenty. Only five more and he'd be safe...

Green lightning flared all around him. The world spun, and his last conscious thoughts were that he wasn't in birdstyle any more, that his momentum was going to carry him over the cliff edge, and that landing was going to _hurt_.


	2. Chapter 2

"Commander, you cannot wait any longer." Anderson reached out and very deliberately turned off the briefing screen. "We cannot allow Spectra to get a foothold in Lulo City. You are to leave now."

"But Jason..." That was Keyop, and Mark sympathised with every bone in his body. He wanted to go find his second, because despite the lack of communication, he was utterly sure that Jason wasn't off celebrating his race win. He should have been here by now. Something was wrong.

And it made no difference, because Anderson was right. Lulo would be a desperate place to dig the enemy out of, if they got established there - a new city, near-completion but barely inhabited yet, located in a deep ancient sinkhole with a transparent weatherproofing dome over the top. ISO had to get someone in there right now or they might not be able to get in at all.

Mark stood up. "G-Force, we're leaving," he said, putting every ounce of command presence he had into his tone. "Phoenix, now."

He glanced around, checking that everyone was with him, and went into the slow armsweep, relieved that they were following.

"Transmute!"

* * *

There were voices nearby, dim and muffled. Two, male, talking about climbing Boomerang. That was the route he and Mark had put up, the first summer, before the war had started for real, on the cliffs down by -

Why was he here? Oh...

Memory and nausea hit simultaneously. Jason rolled over and retched until he was empty. He was vaguely aware of a car pulling away below him, but when he finally stopped heaving, head swimming and vision blurred, all was quiet. No Spectrans. Why hadn't they come after him? He must have been out for long enough for them to get up the cliff if they'd wanted to, because those climbers wouldn't have been nearly as calm if they'd witnessed what had just gone down. Or if there was a squad of goons on the road waiting for him to reappear.

Jason considered getting to his feet, decided it was a bad idea, and instead crawled to the edge of the cliff. The Skyline was still there - how could they not have realised its significance? The car behind it was gone. The car in front was still there. The Spectran convoy was gone, with only a steaming puddle of blue fluid on the roadway showing where it had been.

 _Why didn't they come after me? Why didn't they take the G-2?_

 _They're alien,_ he'd been told repeatedly. _They don't think like us. Don't expect them to._

Well, not thinking like us had just cost them the chance to capture the Condor.

He considered transmuting and had to swallow hard as the nausea returned with a vengeance. No, not a good idea. He was only five minutes from ISO. He'd go back in civilian mode. Carefully and unsteadily, he lowered himself over the edge, trusting his instincts to remember where the easy route down lay.

.

Jason hadn't ever seen Anderson this angry. The man was practically glowing with rage as he came through the door of the briefing room.

"Chief," he said desperately, "there's something you should know. I'm late because I was attacked."

He'd hoped that new information would redirect some of that anger, but Anderson's jaw was set.

"You're late because you stayed to win a race." His tone was icy and controlled despite his expression. "G-Force are on their way to Lulo City without you. You are grounded."

"But Chief -"

"I do not have time for this now. Stay here. We will discuss your behaviour later." He turned on his heel and was gone.

"You need to tell them..." He didn't bother finishing. The door had slammed shut and there was the click of a lock turning.

For a moment, his mind went completely blank. _Stay here. You don't matter; keep out of the way; we wish you didn't exist_. That had been his life before he came to ISO. Right now? Hell yes he mattered, keeping out of the way could get his teammates dead, and if Anderson wished he didn't exist, well, that was Anderson's problem.

He banged on the door. "Open this now!"

"Sir, I'm sorry, we have orders that you're to stay inside." Probably some security guard, not a voice he recognised. Anderson had simply left, off to do something he considered important, which doubtless didn't include telling G-Force about Spectra's new detransmutation ray since he wouldn't listen long enough to find out the damn thing existed.

Jason had transmuted before he'd even considered how he'd felt about it ten minutes earlier. This time... it was okay. Better than okay, actually. Something to do with a tuned field undoing whatever crap that ray had triggered? _Compartmentalise._ He felt better and he was in birdstyle. Good enough.

The lock hadn't been designed to stand up to a furious Condor. Jason had been sure of that. Slightly less sure that the guards would decide that their orders to keep him inside didn't extend to shooting him. The door slammed open with barely a hint of resistance and he was out of the room, down the corridor, and taking the shortest route to his car. Nobody got in his way, which was fortunate for them.

* * *

"Still nothing from Jason?" Mark asked for maybe the fifth time, and instantly felt bad. Like Princess wouldn't have told him the moment their missing team member made contact.

"Nothing. And... I'm not sure, but comms are weird. We're five minutes out from ISO, everything should be crystal clear. We're still in contact, but it's as if we're at really, really long range."

"Comms with ISO, you mean?"

"Yes."

"Transmitted directly from that massive dish on the roof of the north tower, about a million times bigger than the transmitter in a bracelet?"

"Yes."

That was all she needed to say - he could join the dots from there perfectly well. Spectra was blocking their comms, or trying to, and chances were that even if Jason was trying to contact them, he couldn't.

 _We can't go back for him. We just can't._ Anderson had been unequivocal - and right - that allowing Spectra time to dig in would be a complete disaster.

"Any sign of the G-2 on scanners?" he asked.

"No," said Keyop, so quickly that he must surely have already been checking. "And they're fuzzy. Low resolution."

 _Like the comms. It has to be related._

"Five minutes to Lulo," Tiny said. "Where do you want me to land?"

Oh, for his second-in-command sitting behind him, making a million suggestions, most of them wildly risky. If Jason had been there, he knew exactly what he'd do: have Tiny take the Phoenix vertically down into the city just long enough to drop the other four of them off, before blasting out and going to wait somewhere safe. He didn't dare try it with only two people to back him up, neither of them the Condor.

He stared at the plan of the new city: partly constructed, thankfully not inhabited yet. Anderson had assured him that the construction workers had been evacuated. The city of the future, with geothermal heating and a retractable transparent roof over the top, several hundred feet above the buildings, to keep bad weather out. It was laid out with streets radiating from a large central square - well, circle. Large, open, intended as the focus of communal events. Plenty big enough to take five Phoenixes. He disliked the idea of leaving her there, obvious and unmanned, but he had no choice.

He brought up the plan on the secondary screen, highlighted the square. "Right there. Drop straight in fast. I suspect they'll be expecting us to land outside and infiltrate on foot, so let's not do that. We're all going out."

Tiny's expression was horrified. "But -"

"I thought you hated being left behind? We'll seal her up tight, and she'll be close by."

"Commander," Princess said, "I'm worried that bracelet-to-bracelet comms may not work at all. Contacting the Phoenix is more likely to work."

She was, he supposed, his acting second-in-command. And he was glad she'd told him, and understood why she'd done so officially. Even if he didn't want to hear it.

"I can't leave someone on the ship," he said simply. "I can't. Not when we're a man short. It's not a huge city; if someone needs to communicate they will have to come back to the Phoenix and use the comm system here. Is everyone familiar with that?"

He was looking at Keyop, confident that Tiny used it on a regular basis but unsure about their young engineer. The kid nodded confidently, though, and Mark left it at that. In any case, there wasn't time to remind him. They were already dropping towards the open central section of the dome. It didn't appear damaged. He didn't know what the significance of that was, and right now it didn't matter.

He superposed a quick set of lines on the map: four people, four quarters of a circle, numbered 1-5 with 2 missing.

"One quadrant each," he said. "Check for survivors just in case the reports were wrong; but the main objective is to find the Spectran headquarters. Don't take them on alone. Information-gathering. If comms don't work and you're in trouble, send up a flare. Anything unusual, back to the Phoenix. In any case, back to the Phoenix after an hour unless I say otherwise. Clear?"

Two nods from the seats behind him, and one to his left.

"Ready to go in," Tiny said, a question in his voice.

He glanced at the screens, at the scan reports (Keyop was right, they were fuzzy as all hell). No mecha, and nowhere for any to hide. No visible heavy weapons, though they could be anywhere in the city. He had to hope that there hadn't been time for any to be set up. It was still less than an hour since the first reports of an attack had come in. They'd been quick. Quick enough? The next three minutes would be the proof of that.

"Take us down."

Mark didn't arm the Super launcher - he wasn't sure that the natural cavern would survive an explosion of that size - but he had two Standards hot and ready to go, and his eyes glued to the screens for signs that what was going on here was far more extensive and long term than an attack only a couple of hours old. He was twitchy as all hell about this mission, and it wasn't just because Jason should have been the one with his hand on the big red button right now. It felt wrong. If a mecha had come out of the cavern wall he'd have been entirely unsurprised.

It didn't. Nothing did. The city below them lay apparently deserted. Not a light. Not a pedestrian. Not a moving vehicle. Only the Spectran transports sitting in the southwest corner of the square, ramps down, engines cold, gave away that something was very wrong here.

"Northeast corner, Tiny," he said.

"Roger that."

 _There's no way they haven't seen us coming._ But there was still no sign of the Spectran invaders beyond their empty troop transports. What were they _doing_?

The Phoenix settled gently to the ground, nose pointing perfectly through the gap between two trees and out into the centre of the square, optimum position for an emergency takeoff. Still no sign of anyone.

"Anything on the scanners?" he asked.

Keyop's response was something particularly rude in Russian. Mark swung round to see, and found the Swallow shrugging helplessly at a screen which looked as if it had a bad concussion. Doubled images, blurry lines...

"I take it that's as focused as you can get it?"

" _Yes_." It was spat out in disgust, and Mark patted his young team-mate on the shoulder.

"Not your fault, kid. Princess, how are comms?"

"No radio contact with ISO since we dropped out of line-of-sight. Probably the rock, but..."

Oh, he didn't like this at all. But no comms so wasn't an excuse not to do his job. "Anyone not clear on the plan?" he asked.

Three heads shook.

"Then let's do it. Back here in an hour, or sooner if there are problems. Princess, radio check with me as we move out. I want to have some idea how well our comms will work."

.

Princess started counting out loud as soon as they separated at the bottom of the ramp. She was heading northeast, straight into roads and buildings. Mark had assigned himself the direction which involved being out in the open the longest, across the middle of the square and past the deserted Spectran transports. By the time he'd gone fifty yards, her voice over the bracelet was almost unintelligible. Before he'd reached the other side of the square, there was nothing but crackling static, a strange pattern which felt artificial, somehow. He didn't think it was the rock.

Should he have sent them out in pairs? No, he decided, the time factor was crucial here. Two pairs would take twice as long to cover the same ground as four individuals.

For the first time, he wondered if the Spectran plan had been to separate them. If so, they'd succeeded. Every nerve on edge, and hoping the rest of his team were feeling the same, he activated the scanner in his bracelet. It was basic and short range, but it didn't seem to have the same problem that the Phoenix's sophisticated systems had - at least, there was movement on it, just around the next corner. In the wrong place to be one of his team-mates, even if the interference had messed up the identifying signal.

Slow movement, just one person. Not a Spectran squad, and odd behaviour for a single goon, surely nervous at being out in the open on their own. Could it be a civilian, maybe one of the workers left behind in the panic of evacuation? Anderson always assured them that evacuation had been completed. Mark had had his suspicions about how accurate that was before.

Still, no need to take risks. He stayed close to the buildings on the left side of the road, with the line of trees between him and the roadway. This was a shopping district, many shopfronts already carrying the logos of famous brands and some looking almost ready to open for business. The actual construction here was complete. Had anyone moved in already, maybe earlier than they were supposed to, maybe unofficially? The signal on his bracelet moved towards the buildings, and Mark broke into a run. He didn't want to have to search indoors if he could help it.

He rounded the corner, checking instinctively for danger. No Spectrans. Thirty yards ahead of him, a woman crouched in the street, clutching something and sobbing. He'd been right. She wasn't a construction worker.

He was at her side in moments. "Ma'am, are you okay? I'm here to help."

"My... my baby!"

 _Oh heck, first aid_... He knew some, though. "Let me see. Maybe I can -"

The child was thrust into his arms. His first thought was horror - it was stiff and cold, surely long dead. Then confusion. This was a doll, not a baby. Lifeless plastic. Staring glass eyes.

"Ma'am?"

He'd only glanced away from her for a moment, but she was gone, leaving him with a confused impression of long blonde hair.

The unmistakeable sound of Spectran rifles being cocked. Multiple, all around him. _Trap_.

He raised his head slowly, trying to buy himself time. Too far to get back to the corner. The next junction was dozens of yards away. Between him and the nearest cover - a particularly pathetic tree - were multiple goons and... what the heck was that thing? Not a gun barrel. Not a weapon he'd seen before, at least not that he remembered. The figure standing next to it he remembered all too well.

"Good afternoon, Commander." Zoltar smirked - did he have any other expressions? - and Mark stood up straighter, uncomfortably aware of just how much taller than him the Spectran leader was. "Do you want to know what my new toy does?"

He had no intention of playing Zoltar's game, but he needed alternatives. Did he have any chance of making it to the nearest doorway? Possibly, but chances were the door was locked. He had no hope of making it through a locked door before taking bullets, even without whatever that thing was shooting at him.

"You don't care?" Zoltar sounded almost disappointed, and Mark reminded himself that this was not a man, it was an alien. Human psychology didn't apply.

He shrugged, casually and disrespectfully. "Not particularly."

"Oh, but you will! This is my detransmutation ray."

Mark snorted derisively. "Sure it is." _Stay relaxed_ , he told himself. _He's probably better at reading you than you are at reading him. He wants you to care. Make him think you don't._

"Indeed it is!" Zoltar's voice rose in a near-cackle, and the hairs went up on the back of Mark's neck. "Fully operational, and tested on a member of your team, I might add! And now, Commander, I shall demonstrate its effect to you personally!"

 _Jason..._ No time to consider that, or to find the flare he'd told them all to use in an emergency and never thought he'd need himself. Mark took two accelerating strides and leapt for the lowest point in the surrounding roofline, the only place where the buildings were single storey. Maybe he could survive a shot from that thing. Maybe it would miss. Either way, if he was in the next street he had at least some chance of getting away.

"Fire!" Zoltar shrieked from behind him.

Green light flaring all around, a flooding wave of nausea, and the sickening realisation that Zoltar had been telling the truth about his weapon's capabilities. Out of birdstyle he had no glide at all. Mark hit the roof hard, rolled down the far side uncontrollably, and felt himself drop over the edge to the street below, his awareness fading even before he hit the ground.


	3. Chapter 3

The G-2 skidded to a halt at the end of the access road, and Jason was out of the cockpit almost before the engine had died. Ahead of him lay only the long, low building housing the machinery which controlled the transparent dome over Lulo, and the dome itself. It appeared to be fully retracted.

The place was deserted, without a single vehicle in the parking spaces in the shadow of the building walls. Evacuated? He hoped so. Even on a completely empty, wide, straight road where he could get as close to the G-2's top speed as he'd ever managed, driving was a lot slower than flying. He was at least half an hour behind the Phoenix now. He'd had plenty of time to consider his options, and had decided that the entry tunnel intended for use by ground vehicles wasn't the best one. If the Spectrans had even left it accessible - and he'd have turned it into a death trap of rubble the first chance he got, if he'd been the one defending an advance military position in Lulo - it was way too obvious. No, he'd leave the G-2 up here and go in through the dome. Hopefully nobody would be looking up for G-Force's fifth member, arriving late and alone.

He detransmuted the car - which worked just fine when he was standing two feet away from it - and headed for the edge. That was one big hole. Hundreds of feet below him lay city streets, and in the central square, a familiar red and blue ship.

"G-2 to Phoenix," he said, more in hope than expectation. He'd tried repeatedly on the way here, with no response. No response now either, though he did think there was less static now he was closer.

"G-2 to anyone?"

Had he imagined the marginal change in the crackling? Princess would have known. He was choosing to assume that the comms issues were all linked, all malicious, and all associated with whatever was going on in Lulo. Regardless, there was nothing he could do about them up here. Plan: get down to the city and find the rest of the team. Slightly more detailed plan: drop down close to the rock wall in the hopes he wouldn't be seen and work his way back to the Phoenix. If he hadn't found anything by then, he'd need another plan, but that was enough advance planning for now.

Jason took a last look around. Still nobody in sight. Time to go.

He'd been worried about the air currents close to the rockface, but, really, it was simple. Might have been different if it had been windy up above, but it was calm and overcast. Jason settled into a smooth figure-of-eight descending pattern, never closer than five feet to the rockface or further than fifteen from it, and scanned the streets below him the good old-fashioned way. Nothing. More nothing. He was well over half way down when there was movement at the edge of his vision. He swung round to take a better look and just caught a glimpse of a group disappearing round a corner. Multiple figures in green escorting a single smaller one in yellow.

 _Dammit, Mark, you sent Keyop out on his own?_ He squinted hopefully, but no, there was no sign of white down there, and he thought he'd have been able to distinguish Tiny's green and brown from the different shade of the Spectran uniforms. If this was some clever plan of his commander's which he was about to gatecrash, he'd apologise later.

Jason shifted his glide angle, aiming steeply down to reach the apex of the corner at ten feet or so off the ground. Enough time to see what was going on, enough momentum to pile into them and take several down before they even knew what had hit them.

Round the corner, bank sharp left, and there they were, six goons conveniently close together. Idiots. Jason flared his wings hard and hammered into the back of the group feet first. Three dropped instantly. The fourth fell to a punch to the jaw. The fifth actually stood up to the first punch but crumpled to a roundhouse kick, and the sixth, who'd shown a surprising amount of common sense in running away, dropped with a feather shuriken in the back of his neck. Under ten seconds and the only people standing were himself and Keyop. Five seconds after that and six Spectran bodies lay in the deserted street without a sign of what had happened to them. Except the shuriken, which he left as a warning to their friends. Scaring Spectrans was never a bad thing.

"Thanks," Keyop muttered as Jason cut his wrists free. "How did you get here?"

"Drove," he muttered back, scanning the street for any more Spectrans. The doorway they'd dashed to was better cover than nothing, but it couldn't exactly be described as a secure hiding-place. "Where are the others?"

"Don't know. Comms don't work."

 _Tell me something I don't know._ But the kid was trembling with shock. Jason didn't say it. Instead, he asked, "Those goons say anything interesting?"

"They've got some sort of new weapon. They were going to test it on me." His voice wavered, and Jason neglected to tell him that this was old news, too.

"What were your orders?"

"Find out stuff. Meet back at the Phoenix." He looked at the floor. "Don't take them on alone."

"You went after six of them?"

"Thought it was two."

Jason rolled his eyes, though Keyop wasn't looking at him. Not the time to discuss this. At least there was a very clear next course of action.

"We'll go back to the Phoenix. Are you good?"

As he'd hoped, Keyop stiffened, stood up straighter, and the trembling stopped. "Yes."

"Then let's go."

.

Five minutes brought them back to the Phoenix, a very subdued Keyop shadowing him far more closely than normal. The Swallow did finally move ahead of him as they moved from the cover of the buildings, running to open the bottom ramp while Jason covered him with the cablegun drawn, watching all around for observers, or any attempt to rush them and gain entry.

Nothing happened. Keyop jumped up inside without bothering to use the ramp, Jason followed him, and they both stood guard as the ramp swung back up into position and sealed the Phoenix up tight. Only then did he try the bracelet again.

"G-2, who's home?"

Two lights flashed in response - Princess and Tiny - and then there was the sound of running footsteps. Definitely not Tiny.

"Jason! Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. Where's Mark?"

Even behind the visor he could see the tension in her face. Not here; should have been. Which put him in command. Yay.

"We'll talk on the flight deck," he said. "If we're about to be stormed, I want to see them coming."

.

Tiny was in his seat watching the screens, but swung round as they came through the door.

"No sign of him," he said.

 _And no prizes for guessing who you mean._ Jason checked the screens for himself, but they were as uninteresting as Tiny had said. So, time to take over.

"Fill me in," he said. "I'll start. Spectra have something that's screwing with comms, and a detransmutation ray. Maybe the same thing. I don't know."

"We didn't know about the ray," Princess said slowly. "Jase, are you okay?"

"I'm fine." He suspected that some of it was the implant and some of the rest was adrenaline, but for now, yup, he was fine. "What did Anderson tell you?"

"Anderson didn't brief you?" She frowned.

"No. Move on."

"Spectra attacked Lulo City. It's a new development and nobody lives here yet. Only a few workers here, and they were evacuated. Our mission is to make sure the Spectrans can't dig in and create a base here. Plus anything else we can figure out, like why they'd try to establish a base somewhere that's so obvious."

"Not that," said Keyop suddenly. "It's not a base. It's a trap."

"Who for?" Tiny asked, and then the colour drained from his face. "A comms-jammer and a detransmutation ray? It's a trap for us. And it's worked. They've got Mark."

 _We'll never find him in this rabbit warren with no comms._ Jason fought down the panic. _Think, man!_

"Let's assume they're the same thing," he said. "Or at least that they're in the same place. Princess, can you track the interference?"

"It's everywhere."

"I know that. Where's it strongest?"

"Oh. _Oh_." She almost ran to her console, sat down, and began flicking switches.

"Scanners too!" Keyop said suddenly, and headed for his own seat.

"You can track it? With something portable?"

Princess glanced over her shoulder. "Give me ten minutes."

"What can -" Jason cut himself off. He could give her ten minutes. For now, he'd watch the screens and hope that any moment his commander was going to jog into sight.

* * *

 _I'm alive._

That was something, at least.

 _I'm in a bed._

That was unexpected. Spectran cells didn't go in for beds, or furniture of any sort. Mark opened his eyes a tiny crack.

"Commander Jaruzelski?"

He froze. His official rank and his real name. Nobody used them together. Nobody.

"I know you're awake, friend. Stop pretending. We need to talk."

 _I recognise that voice... but from where?_ Opening his eyes couldn't possibly put him at any more of a disadvantage.

Generic hotel room, he suspected. Shutters across the window, blocking most of the light. He was lying on the only bed, not in birdstyle, and a figure sat in the chair alongside it. Deep red uniform, and what he'd always considered to be a particularly impractical hat. And now he was a little more alert, he knew whose voice it was.

"Colonel Cronus? What are you doing here?"

"Apart from scraping you off the street before a Spectran goon squad could pick you up?"

"For which I thank you. But I'm serious. What is a colonel in the Rigan Red Rangers doing here on Earth, and why don't I know about it?" He sat up, clarity returning by the second. "You know who I am. You know I'm the senior field commander here. If you were sent to Earth officially, and you're in uniform, so it's official, then your superiors should have contacted ISO. It would have been in my briefing. It wasn't. So what is going on?"

"I have no superiors."

That was so unexpected that Mark felt his jaw drop. Cronus had been an instructor at a training facility: the space station where Mark had spent a few weeks doing zero g training alongside a class of cadets from the Rigan Space Academy. He squinted at the uniform, wondering if he'd missed something. No, that was definitely the insignia of a Red Ranger colonel, nowhere near their highest rank.

"I don't understand."

"The Red Rangers are all but gone. I'm the senior surviving officer, to the best of my knowledge. Now, I'm sorry you weren't informed, but that ray? It turns Rigans into brainwashed zombies who'll do exactly what they're told. Everything from suicide bombing to giving up every military secret they know. Not traitors, not cowards. Good loyal officers who I'd known for years. So no, I wasn't about to tell anyone who might turn right round and let Spectra know exactly where to find what's left of my squadron."

Mark blinked, trying to make sense of what he was being told. "Only Rigans?"

Cronus snorted. "Apparently it has an entirely different effect on you."

 _Detransmutation and unconsciousness... but what about humans who aren't implanted? What about implanted humans who aren't transmuted?_ He glanced at his bracelet, and oh heck he should have been back at the Phoenix half an hour ago! He'd been unconscious for a lot longer than the few minutes he'd presumed. What if he wasn't the only one they'd captured?

He was on his feet and half way through the transmutation armsweep when a wave of giddiness hit. He staggered sideways and would have fallen if Cronus hadn't caught his other arm.

"You need to take it easy for a while."

"I need to get back to my team, and we need to destroy that thing." He shrugged Cronus's hand off. Transmutation worked this time, though it took everything he had to fight through the wave of wrongness that swept over him as the field flared, and then some more to pretend that there wasn't a problem.

"Then, my friend, I will wish you good luck." Cronus held his hand out, and Mark shook it.

"You too."


	4. Chapter 4

The city was very different now that Mark considered himself the hunted rather than the hunter. Every window could hide a sniper. Every doorway could hold a squad of goons. Birdstyle didn't feel like the protection it had once been, and he watched the scanner hoping that nothing moved instead of waiting for a target.

Shadows seemed longer. Lines of sight poorer. And it felt like a million miles back to the Phoenix.

Half way there and suddenly there was movement on the scanner. A whole squad just round the next corner. Mark flattened himself against the side of the building, grateful for the line of trees separating the pedestrian and vehicle areas on this particular street. If he moved slowly, he could stay out of sight even against a wall this smooth.

Hold on, though? A squad of four? Spectrans didn't operate in fours. They considered it horribly unlucky.

"G-1, come in," he said into the bracelet.

The four dots stopped moving.

"If you're the single dot to our southwest, come join us," crackled out of his bracelet. Horribly distorted, but that was Jason's voice. Had to be, of course. Four dots meant his whole team was there.

He took a deep, steadying breath and darted across the street. Nothing else on his scanner, and he stepped round the corner.

They were barely ten yards away, in an alcove, about as close to cover as they were likely to get round here. None of them appeared to be hurt. Jason had the cablegun out and was covering the street. Princess crouched over a handheld electronic device that he didn't recognise. Something she'd put together, from the looks of it.

He knew he should walk straight in and take control. Instead, Jason took one look at him and swore.

"You look like crap. Keyop, keep watch."

A hand in the small of his back propelled him to the back of the alcove, and Jason was peering into his eyes, squinting through the visor.

"They hit you with that ray?"

Well, that saved explanations, at least.

"Thought so. When did you manage to transmute again?"

That sounded a lot like first-hand knowledge, and if Jason had figured something out, he needed to know.

"Not sure how long it was. A couple of minutes after I came round?"

"And how did that go?"

"Bad," he admitted. "I had to force it, big time."

"Yeah. Based on my statistical sample of one, I suggest you detransmute and try again. I couldn't get past it for twenty minutes, but once I wasn't having to force it, it helped."

"They _shot_ you? Both of you?" That was Tiny, and Jason nodded.

"Yes. Not discussing it now. Do it, Mark. It might help and you look like you're about to keel over."

Right now, he'd try anything - it wasn't just how ill he felt, it was the horrible sense of wrongness, don't-want-to-be-here, total uncertainty. Mark glanced out of the alcove just to confirm that there was nobody else in sight, reversed his transmutation, and brought his hand over again.

 _Jason was right._ That felt _so_ much better. All of a sudden he wasn't prey in a strange and unfamiliar place, he was the Eagle and he had a job to do.

"Good call," he said. "Now, we need to find that ray and we need to destroy it. It's already taken out half the Rigan Red Rangers."

"Mark," said Tiny carefully, "they don't transmute."

"No, they don't. Apparently it also has a nice set of Rigan brainwashing facilities. I don't know whether humans are affected and I have no intention of finding out."

"So we take off and reduce Lulo to a pile of steaming rubble?" Jason asked.

"And take out the other half of the Rigan Red Rangers?"

"What the hell are the Red Rangers doing here?"

"We'll discuss that later. For now, bombing the city is off the table. I'll take other options."

"Princess is tracking the source of the comms interference," Tiny said. "We were guessing it's in the same place as the weapon. Maybe even it's the weapon causing it."

Mark nodded. His comm-tech was crouched alongside him, studying the screen of her hand built device intently. "Do you know where it is yet?" he asked her.

"I'm doing a lot of guessing and approximating, but I think it's about two hundred yards that way." She pointed north.

"Anyone bring a map?" he asked.

Jason snorted. "I've seen a map, that good enough for you? There's a square in the right place. Not as big as the one you left the Phoenix in."

Mark suspected that Jason could name and describe every street which led to it. He didn't need that level of detail. A mixture of instinct and imagination was telling him that Zoltar was highly likely to have based himself there. Probably with that ray parked right in the middle, heavily guarded, and with no chance that anyone could creep up on it.

"Any ideas for destroying the weapon?" he asked. "You have seen it, right?"

"Wish I hadn't. I've never seen anything target so fast. We may have to get close enough to plant explosives."

"I'm not sure I like the sound of that."

"Me neither. Right now it's the best I've got."

Maybe not surprising that Jason's suggestions amounted to blowing the thing up. He'd still have liked a few more details.

"We're heading to that square," he said. "Jase, you're navigating. I want to get a good look at the layout, and then we'll discuss options. Be very clear here, we cannot afford to get hit by that thing. We're not going in without a strategy."

He looked pointedly at his second, and got a brusque nod in return. Keyop might have followed Jason's lead, but he was unlikely to freelance. The other two would follow orders.

"Move out," he said, and put himself at the back of the group. What he wanted was some sort of shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. They'd never carried heavy weapons, the argument being that if anything beyond hand-to-hand was needed, they should be using their vehicles. Maybe he should send Princess back for her bike. But in the silent city streets, the sound of an engine would be as good as a target marker.

No decisions yet, he told himself as he followed his team deeper into the residential area, with narrower streets and much shorter sightlines. Find the thing, observe, and then pick the least worst option.

Twenty yards ahead of him, Jason held his hand up and moved sideways into a doorway. By the time Mark reached him, the door was open and his second had vanished inside.

"Is it here?" he asked Princess, who had stopped just inside the door, her scanner out again.

"Twenty yards, as far as I can tell. Just past the junction."

"Watch this door."

She nodded, and he headed up the stairs after the others.

Jason stood by a giant picture window in what should have been someone's living room, looking out across an open area. Just outside the window, a ring of very new and rather sparse trees in oversize concrete tubs would one day provide a green edge to the square while blocking most of the view. For now, they were at least a visual distraction which would make it much less likely that anyone outside would notice movement behind the glass. He must remember to comment on it in the debrief. Jason was forever getting stick for his lack of strategic thinking. Credit was due for this one.

"Right square?" he asked.

"Right square." Jason pointed unnecessarily, and Mark joined him at the window.

The ray stood in the centre of the square, with no cover around it for thirty yards in any direction. Goons surrounded it, alert, facing out. Multiple squads patrolled the square further out. At the centre, next to the ray and with one hand resting on it proprietarily, a distinctive red and purple figure.

"You'd think they might have figured out that we'll try to get in close and destroy it," Jason said.

"Yeah." Mark continued to examine the layout of the square. It wasn't _that_ far to the ray.

"I can throw that far," he said.

"I could probably throw that far when I was five. Throw what, though? Shuriken aren't going to touch it. You think your boomerang would get through the armour?"

Mark pulled out a handful of the explosive charges they all carried - small spiky spheres, body an inch across, spikes maybe double that.

"I guess they might do enough damage," Jason said. He didn't sound convinced.

"We only need to damage it enough to make it less effective."

"True. Speaking of which, it runs real hot. It was dripping smoking coolant before. Looks like they've repaired it now, though."

"From where?"

"Pipes on the right hand side."

Mark squinted at it, but he had to agree, there was no sign of a leak now. He didn't think he remembered one from earlier, either, though he hadn't exactly had time to examine it in detail. For a moment he'd hoped that the 'pipes' might be flexible hoses, vulnerable to a boomerang strike or even shuriken, but no, they were heavily armoured metal just like the rest of the thing. Still, they might be the weak point. A potential target for his explosives.

He tried not to think that Zoltar wouldn't be standing there, in the open, unless he had some sort of protection that they couldn't even see. He suspected Jason was thinking it too, given that his second hadn't even suggested just plain shooting him.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs outside, and Keyop and Tiny came in at a run.

"The penthouse has a balcony," Tiny said between gasps. "We could jump down and -"

"No." Mark's reaction was instinctive, and Jason's voice echoed his own.

"We'll consider it as a plan B," Mark continued as his pilot's face fell. "But this thing is different. I wasn't joking when I said we can't afford to get hit by it. If we jump down we'll be unconscious before we reach the ground. Now, Keyop, come here a minute. See those pipes on the right side of the nose of that thing?"

Keyop nodded, visor up almost against the glass.

"I don't want you to use your bolos unless we're out of other options, but if it comes to that, they're your target. Clear?"

"Clear."

"Then let's take a look at this balcony."

.

Normally he'd have agreed with Tiny: this would have been a great place to jump down into action from. The goons would have scattered like flies, he and Jason would have charged in on the central target, and they'd have had it in pieces inside a minute. Instead, he crouched behind the parapet, peering through the gaps in the panelling, deciding exactly what he should target with his explosives.

"Commander," Jason said after a couple of minutes, "I know we have to be careful, but don't you think we should get on with it?"

Mark opened his mouth to say yes, eyed up his target... and his instinct screamed at him to delay just a moment longer. He hesitated.

"What is your problem?"

"I'm not..."

Jason wasn't listening. He was staring over Mark's right shoulder.

"Oh, crap," he said.

Mark turned to see what had worried his second. At the far side of the square, a squad of goons was escorting a group of captives into the square. Human captives. Ordinary workers, men and women, maybe a dozen. In the centre of the square, the ray swung round towards them.

 _Brainwashed zombies who'll do anything they're told. Suicide bombing._

"Change of plan," he snapped, and leapt over the parapet.

.

 _Remember how quick that thing is. Wait. Wait..._ now!

Small explosive charges were suddenly the perfect weapon. Mark hurled one at the nearest group of goons to his right, another to the left, and landed in front of the nearest tree just as both exploded.

Wait just a breath, enough for the sound of the explosions to die away, and... "Hey, Zoltar! You're pointing the wrong way!"

"Get him!" That was a scream of fury from the Spectran leader.

As Mark had hoped, the ray swung round towards him without firing at the civilians. The green lightning lashed out, fast and accurate, directly at the point where he'd landed.

He wasn't there any more.

From the other side of the street, a familiar laugh rang out. "Were you aiming for me, Zoltar?"

" _Shoot him!_ "

Another swing of the ray. Another sight-defying zigzag of green. Jason was safe behind the next tree along, and another voice rang out, this one from much higher up.

"Me, surely?"

Mark held his breath - Tiny didn't have the speed of the rest of them. Had he realised just how fast and deadly this weapon was?

"No, me!" Keyop must have been running round the rooftops at breakneck speed, as his voice rang out from half way to the far side of the square.

The Spectran captain at the controls of the ray hesitated, didn't fire at Tiny, fired wildly at Keyop.

"You're a terrible shot!" Princess appeared in the street to his right. "You need much more practice."

A scream of rage from the Spectran leader. And... some sort of remonstration? Whatever it was the captain was saying, it wasn't popular. Zoltar hurled him from the seat and climbed into it himself. Mark took advantage of the changeover time to cartwheel out of cover, across in front of Jason's tree, and behind the next one.

As he arrived, he caught sight of Tiny dropping from the balcony level, in full clown mode, arms circling wildly.

"Whoopeee!" the Owl cried, and ducked behind the tree Mark had just come from. Green fire splattered against the concrete base, but as far as Mark could tell, this weapon didn't do actual physical damage to anything.

Jason moved next, backflipping back across the street, past Tiny, and to the next tree. Princess went in the other direction, but Mark didn't pay her much attention. He was focused on the scene at the ray's controls. Zoltar's face was crimson with rage, and he was furiously adjusting controls. The captain was on his knees, apparently imploring his leader to stop. And... those pipes Jason had mentioned? They were steaming, a distinct cloud of blue haze gathering above them, and there were drips of fluid on the ground.

 _We don't need to destroy it. He'll do it for us._

Mark launched himself into a brief glide, somersaulting mid-flight with a cheery wave at their adversary, and landed neatly beside Jason as the ray hit the building behind them. The shots were getting wilder, but that didn't matter. The green flare was brighter now.

"It's overheating," he said. "If we can keep him firing..."

"I like this plan." Jason was gone, outdoing him with a double backflip to reach Princess.

"Keep him firing," Mark repeated into the bracelet, but the static was stronger than ever. The other two would have to figure it out from what the rest of the team were doing. From Tiny's antics - facepulling which wouldn't have shamed an entire class of kindergarten students - it seemed likely that they already had.

He left them to it and went back to the cartwheels. One-armed, this time.

An audible scream of rage from Zoltar when the next shot missed. Another furious twist of the controls. The Spectran captain fled, wailing.

 _Time to finish this_. Mark flipped towards the centre of the square, once, twice, and the third time came down on one knee instead of his feet. Lapwing, they called this move, after the bird which faked injury to distract attention. He saw the ray swing towards him, heard Princess scream - that was in their strategies, too - and hurled himself to the left as a flare so bright it was colourless shot towards where he'd been. The universe paused, air heavy with static, and he knew what was coming.

"Down!" he howled, and flung himself face down on the ground, cape over his head. The explosion followed a heartbeat later; silent, ground-shuddering waves of force washing over him, past him.

It stopped. Still no sound. No buildings collapsing, no secondary explosions. Mark sat up warily, glancing around. The ray was gone as if it had never been there.

"Sound off," he said hopefully into the bracelet.

Not a hint of static in the four cheerful replies.

He stood up, shaking dirt from his wings and taking stock of the situation. No sign of Zoltar, or his captain. At the far side of the square, the goons guarding the civilians briefly stood their ground before dropping their weapons and fleeing rather than face an advancing Swallow. The remaining squads were already gone - before the explosion, he suspected, though he'd not paid them much attention at the time.

"Nice scream," Jason said as he and Princess approached.

She grinned. "I've been practicing. Didn't you -?"

A roar split the air, and Mark groaned inwardly - he'd have recognised the sound of a Spectran mecha in emergency takeoff anywhere, even without the giant craft appearing over the rooftops and accelerating towards the sky. Zoltar was getting away. Again.

What he hadn't expected was the second roar, the note different, higher-pitched but just as familiar, and two Riga fighters accelerating after it.

Two. _What's left of my squadron_ , Cronus had said. There should have been seven.

"Back to the Phoenix," he said, and started to run.

.

It was several hundred yards away, and locked up tight, and the engines were cold, and by the time they'd lifted out of the sinkhole the skies were empty. Keyop shook his head sadly when asked about anything useful on the scanners, and Mark was forced to admit that the mecha was gone. Hopefully Cronus and his wingman had caught it. He suspected not.

For now, he considered a sunken city containing at least one squad of panicked, leaderless goons and weighed it against the information Cronus had given him, information that he hadn't dared tell anyone other than face to face, that Anderson still didn't have.

"Get me a radio link to ISO USA Actual," he said.

"I think that's you," Jason said a moment later, after just enough of a pause that he suspected panicking, pleading looks from his comm-tech.

 _Yes, it probably is_. "I mean the main ISO control centre. Not black section."

The light on his comm flashed a couple of minutes later, and a uniformed ISO major appeared on the screen. "Commander, what can I do for you?"

"I need cleanup teams in Lulo City as soon as possible. Resistance should be minimal but there are still Spectran troops down there, and some civilians. It's no longer a Spectran objective."

"Yes, Commander. Who's in charge down there?"

"Whoever you put in charge down there."

Give him his due, the man didn't blink. "Understood," he said, and the screen went blank.

"Right then," Mark said. "Jason, where did you leave the G-2?"


	5. Chapter 5

As Jason circled down to the parking lot and the single lonely car in it, he wasn't surprised to see the Phoenix hovering over the opening in Lulo's domed roof. Mark had been wearing that 'no good choices' expression of his ever since he'd ordered them back to the Phoenix. Civilians and goons still in Lulo, urgent information too sensitive to trust to the radio waves. Not that telling his commander would have helped, but he'd have made the same call. Broken goons with their leaders gone were no threat at all. A standard ISO security team would be here inside an hour, and a set of detailed scans showing the exact location of every lifesign in the city would make their job a whole lot easier.

Considerably less than an hour. At the edge of his hearing, those were ISO transport copters, two of them, coming this way at high speed. Time to not give them a show. He remote-transmuted the G-2 from forty feet up, dropped straight into the cockpit, and headed out onto the highway, accelerating hard.

"G-5, I'm ready for pickup," he said into the bracelet. "Not often we get this much clear road. Let's make it a fast one."

.

He strolled back onto the flight deck without trying to hide the broad grin. 300kph was twice as fast as they'd ever tried pickup for real before, and it had gone without a hitch.

"That was fun," Tiny said without turning round.

"Sure was. How about a thousand next time?"

"You're joking, right?"

"Yup." The G-2's theoretical top speed was a thousand kilometres an hour, flat out, all safeties off. He wasn't at all sure it would stay on the road at that speed, whatever the simulations said.

 _I'll probably never drive it again_. Realisation hit like a sledgehammer, and he physically staggered into the arm of his seat. Maybe his compartmentalisation wasn't so bad after all.

"Jase?" Mark was on his feet, half way across the flight deck towards him. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah." He seriously considered leaving it at that. But his commander was about to have to deal with the fallout of what he'd done, and deserved to know exactly how badly this was all about to blow up in his face. "Can I talk to you?"

Mark's eyebrows went up, visible even behind the visor. "Sure. G-5, take us home." He indicated the door at the back of the flight deck, and Jason followed him out.

"If it's about you not pulling out of the race, we'll discuss that later," Mark said as the door shut behind them. "We're done playing the... what do you call it, 'I say jump and you can only ask how high' game. I gave you all the information Anderson gave me and he's the one who needs to stop doing it. But we are going to talk about you not following my orders. Does that help?"

 _If only_. Jason shook his head. "Ten second version? Spectra jumped me with that ray on the back road to ISO. When I made it home, Anderson didn't believe me. He grounded me and locked me in to wait for you to get back. I kicked the door down and walked out. You're not going to need to worry about me not following orders any more."

"He..." Mark stopped. Rubbed his chin. "He _locked you in_? He didn't send you to help us?"

"Guess he figured a liar who can't follow orders is worthless anyway."

Mark said nothing, just looked at him for a long moment. Then, "Where you grew up, they thought that about you, didn't they? They made sure you knew they thought it."

He had to swallow. He'd known Mark was taught to read people and was damn good at it, but _man_.

"Believe me, I don't think that. I will sort this out, but you have got to trust me. That means that you leave it to me and you keep your temper. What do you say?"

He found his voice from somewhere. "Uh... thank you?"

"You can thank me later. For now, hold tight to that 'acting as one' spiel and let me take the lead."

The engine note changed along with the angle of the floor, preparation for landing, and Jason followed his commander back onto the flight deck, unsure what he thought, or even what he wanted to think.

.

"Mark tells me you were hit with a Spectran weapon that forced detransmutation," was the first thing Chris Johnson said as Jason closed the doctor's office door behind him.

He froze. Mark had, commander's privilege, gone through the medical checks first. Had flashed Jason an encouraging grin and signed "you go last" as he headed for the door. Jason had assumed this was to give him an extra couple of minutes to talk to Anderson about the Rigans before formal debrief started.

Only now did it occur to him that Mark could have wanted those extra couple of minutes to discuss something entirely different.

 _Mark wouldn't_.

 _Mark wouldn't have to_ , that little nagging voice in his head said. _Anderson could have set this up and Mark's real good at following orders._

But Chris Johnson was very possibly the worst liar in the known universe. Nobody in their right mind would use him as part of a setup.

Two choices. Trust Mark, or turn round, transmute, leave through the nearest window, and never come back.

"Jason?" Real concern, and the doctor was peering into his eyes. "Talk to me. Did you hit your head?"

"No. Well, probably." He let the doctor guide him to a chair, abruptly aware that something wasn't right. "I'm not concussed. I hit the ground hard, but it's only bruises."

"Hit the ground with what?"

"I don't remember."

Chris raised his eyebrows, and Jason snorted. "I was unconscious before I hit the ground, not because of it. I know what concussion feels like."

"Yes, you do. So, if you're not concussed, there's something else wrong, isn't there? Tell me about your implant."

He felt mentally for the controls, and... "It's not right," he admitted. "Could a weapon do that? A ray?"

"If we understood Spectran weaponry well enough to know that, we'd make sure it couldn't." Chris typed something. "I've called Mike Bennett to come retune it. They'll have to debrief without you for once."

.

Given the choice between sitting through a debrief and having his implant retuned, Jason wasn't sure which he'd choose normally. Right now, with the debrief consisting of every choice he'd made being dissected and the implant retune being actually necessary? No contest.

So he lay face down on the table, head and shoulders strapped immobile just in case the man sticking probes in the electronics on his spine managed to trigger a reflex, and focused on relaxing. It made it easier, a bit.

Ten minutes, this time, and as he sat up and rubbed the back of his neck, Chris came back in.

"Sorted?"

"Yeah." He meant it, too. Often after an implant retune he struggled to feel the difference, even when the before and after were visibly different on the scope. This one felt better.

"Any chance anyone else got clipped by it?"

 _Any chance?_ Jason almost laughed out loud. Mark, everything by the book Eagle Scout Mark, had flat out _lied_ in his post-mission medical.

Now, what had his commander done with the fifteen minutes of Condor-free debrief he'd bought himself?

"I'll check," he said.

.

The 'occupied' light was still on over the door of briefing room one. Jason wasn't sure whether this was good or bad, and decided he didn't care. It would be over with quickly, at least. He tapped once and went in without waiting for an answer.

No additional debrief personnel, which was good. Nobody in his chair, which was also good. Everyone sitting down, which meant the reports were finished. Nobody was yelling. If there was tension in the air, he couldn't feel it. He dared to hope that things had gone well.

"Thank you for joining us, Jason," Anderson said. "Take a seat. We were just discussing your racing schedule."

Adrenaline spiked so hard that he barely stifled a gasp. _That_ was going to be the price? No more racing?

 _Leave it to me_ , Mark had said, and his commander was relaxed. Not gloating, not disappointed, just normal. He held to that thought, taking his seat in silence.

"As Mark has reminded me, racing is probably the best driving training you could have, and at the moment you are doing it in your free time. That will stop."

He heard _stop_. He heard _best driving training_. His brain refused to make any sense of the two statements combined, and Anderson continued.

"Racing will be part of your official training timetable from now on. Draw up a list covering the next three months and we will discuss the practicalities tomorrow. Dismissed."

He was only vaguely aware of the door shutting behind Anderson, and it took Keyop's whoop of glee to bring him back to reality.

"You get to race as part of your training? That's so cool. That's so unfair!"

"Live with it, short stuff," he said automatically. "Mark... how?"

"I had Princess play the tape from the G-2's dashcam, since you weren't here to give your report in person. It wasn't the clearest, but beyond question there were Spectrans and a ray weapon. If he'd listened to you, we'd have known what we were up against before we left the Phoenix. We nearly had a disaster today and it would have been on him, not you. He knows that now. It won't happen again."

"Mark's not just saying that, Jase," Tiny said. "Anderson was well shaken up."

"Good." He leant on his newly retuned implant to calm the adrenaline - maybe it was set a bit too sensitive, if he was honest - and remembered why he was here. "Oh, and do we think anyone else on the team might have been clipped by that ray, just possibly? Medical staff asked me to check, since nobody mentioned it. They'll need a proper retune."

Tiny glanced at him, glanced at Mark, and burst out laughing. "No!"

"I needed to be here for the debrief. I needed for Jason to not be here. It worked, didn't it?"

 _It worked_. The relief wasn't implant-provided, this time. He'd messed up, he'd defied his commander... and Mark had still defended him, argued in his favour, _wanted_ him rather than tolerated him.

They'd need to deal with the fallout from this one, figure out exactly where the line lay between insubordination and giving a second opinion, but the knot of fear that his position relied on never ever getting it wrong - that was gone.

So, the next three months? The track season had five weekends left. Then ISO Racing switched their focus to rallying, and there were some big races coming up, things he hadn't dared even consider entering. The Interstellar 500 was at the end of next month. If he did well there, maybe even the Africa 9000.

He'd have a list of races on Anderson's desk within the hour.

* * *

Author's note: the one thing I did look up was the name of the city, since I remembered changing it and I'd called it Metropolis. Cool science fiction name when I was fourteen, deeply confusing on a fanfic site which includes fandoms that also have cities called Metropolis, especially from someone who writes crossovers. I still think Lulo is a silly name for a city but I've learned to live with canon having silly names sometimes.

The first half's surprisingly close to the episode, though Anderson's a lot less mean to Jason in canon than I had him - Jason says he's not expecting to be believed, but after the first snarl about him having been late because he stayed to win a race. Anderson believes him. The lock-in is all mine - we don't see Anderson send him out in the episode, but there's no suggestion that he didn't.

The second half, not so much accuracy. There's a whole lot of retconning of how come nobody in this episode ever thinks to get on the radio and tell someone else what's going on, the order of who gets captured when and where is all over the place, and in canon it's Anderson who figures out how the ray can be destroyed (though it has a much fancier technobabble name than "overheating"), at which point and without comment suddenly the radio works just fine.

Mind controlled Rigans was all my own work, apparently - an attempted retcon for why and how the Rigans are there at all, which is itself a hangover from the original Gatchaman where the Red Rangers aren't from another planet so are rather more likely to show up for a routine evacuation. This time round I simply ignored that in the BotP episode Mark shows up to the final showdown in a Riga fighter disguised as Cronus (it is in my first version) because no matter how I try to retcon it, it makes no sense at all for him to go from one bit of an underground city to another bit of it in a plane, and once I'd lost the mind control plot device I invented (Mark had Amazing Telepathic Superpowers in that version of my AU and freed them all with the power of his mind) then the retcon that he was disguised as Cronus because Zoltar thought Cronus was under his control didn't work either. So that whole aspect of the story is a retcon of a retcon. Actually it's a retcon of a retcon of a retcon, because in the original Gatchaman the Cronus character had died several episodes earlier and it's one of his lieutenants who rescues G-1. I guess the BotP writers figured eight year olds wouldn't notice that it was a different character since the uniforms are the same. In my case at least, they were right.

Jason's punishment being to drive races as part of his job? Canon. Yes, really.


End file.
